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The ABR supports nursing mothers

I’ve given the ABR a lot of flak over the past few years at pretty much every opportunity, from their expensive, non-portable, and occasionally questionably-written examination to their fumbling of a technical mishap during last year‘s June examination in Chicago. Today, I wanted to highlight something I think the ABR does well, which is something that other medical boards should strive to do better: support nursing mothers.

I also wanted to give additional props on customer service, because unlike my experiences in the past, when I emailed the ABR recently to confirm their nursing mother’s policy, they responded within an hour with a detailed and thorough response.

These are the ABR accommodations for nursing mothers:

* Your pump must be kept in your locker until needed. * A private room is available where you can go to pump. * If you do not have a battery-operated pump, an electrical outlet will be available. * You will need to provide your own method to store / refrigerate the milk. * Your break time clock will be updated to reflect a total of 60 minutes of break time. While on break, your exam time will pause and break timer will count down. Once break time has expired, your exam time will begin counting down. * Any extra time you need beyond the additional time will cut into your regular exam time. These accommodations are standard at both Tucson and Chicago locations.

So, the ABR provides a private space with an electrical outlet and a bit of extra time (30 min) to accommodate nursing mothers. They do ask that you submit an official-looking ADA form at least three months in advance, but this is only a mild inconvenience because they clarified that they do not require a signed doctor’s note as would be necessary in the case of actual disability.

There is a dearth of women in radiology, and this type of support—while free and requiring only a nominal effort—is nonetheless rare and very meaningful, and I want to give credit where it’s due and applaud the ABR’s improving efforts for inclusivity. One of the perks of the ABR’s choice to administer all examinations at their own locations is that they completely control the experience and the rules.

So while I and others have criticized the ABR for imposing additional travel costs and inconvenience on examinees to fly to one of two testing locations in order to take a computerized exam that should theoretically be distributable, I don’t want to discount the overall good job the ABR does with the exam experience. It’s undeniably substantially better than that of your typical commercial testing center with their prison-like ambiance, inefficiencies, and unpleasant TSA-style pat downs. Accommodations for nursing mothers at most commercial testing centers like Prometric and PearsonVue are typically permission to pump in a filthy public restroom or perhaps your car.

Now, as a comparison: feel free to read how this story of a pediatrician’s experience a couple years back. Or this ACLU post about how the NBME handles nursing. Long story short, even though Prometric locations are required by federal law to have a private room to pump available for their employees, they would never deign to share it with an examinee. Instead, it was:

It is still up to you to find a place suitable to you to nurse; whether it is your car, a restroom, or any other public space accessible to you as an exam candidate

Additionally, many accommodations from boards like the ABIM still require a doctor’s note:

Documentation from a medical provider demonstrating the need for an accommodation – ordinarily, a physician’s letter stating the candidate’s delivery date and the anticipated frequency/duration of sessions to express breast milk will suffice.

That’s just silly.

We’re physicians. The purpose of a board exam is to ensure that trainees and recent graduates are ready for safe independent practice, not an opportunity to play at being a poorly-organized police state.

It’s trivial to give women a quiet room to pump in and the respect that they deserve. It’s not even an accommodation—it’s just the decent thing to do. And I don’t think it’s acceptable in 2018 for most major medical organizations to cede the responsibility for all testing policy implementations to large testing corporations that clearly do not care about service.

While the federal law for nursing mothers was designed to protect hourly employees and doesn’t apply to customers or salaried employees (like residents, sadly), I think a law that was written to prevent the extortion of employees earning minimum-wage is probably a good starting point for the standards we should also expect for physicians and just about everyone else in the country. Good job, ABR.

3 Comments

Thanks for commenting on this. I took the Core in 2016 with a 12-week-old at home. Although they told me they wouldn’t provide an outlet, the room they assigned was a handicapped bathroom with a chair and a lock and a convenient outlet. So I had a battery pack but thankfully didn’t have to use it. They let me bring an extra mini-cooler, a scarf and all my usual supplies with no extra screening or embarrassment. When I logged in the much-needed extra hour of break time was automatically assigned with no issue. Overall I was pleasantly surprised with how simple and streamlined the process was and really do applaud the ABR for this.

Forgot to add: I believe there were two other women who also pumped during that exam. For obvious reasons, R3 and R4 are a good time to have children, especially if your program follows the ABR rules for maternity leave rather than their own stringent institutional guidelines (*cough*UW*cough*). As I learned from my own time through it, you can plan a pregnancy all you want, there’s still a +/- 6 month window of error.